Siri

Apple made good progress over the past year with Siri reliability and speed (note: I use the Italian Siri), but I believe the way Siri handles voice input recognition is still inferior to Google’s Voice Search and even Microsoft’s Cortana for Windows Phone 8.1. On iOS, you never know if Siri interpreted your voice command correctly until it gets a response back from the server, and if something went wrong during dictation (say, Siri misunderstood “three” for “tree”), you have to wait until it shows dictated text to try again.

Damn skippy-Siri is now woefully behind the offerings from Google, and perhaps Microsoft as well. For me, I HATE that Siri doesn’t work at all without: 1. Recording your voice; 2. Compressing that audiostream; 3. Uploading the compressed file to Apple; 4. Waiting for Apple’s servers to figure out what you said; 5. Send the results back to your iDevice; and finally, 6. Acting on your request. That takes too damn long. If you have spotty coverage and no wifi, then you’re SOL. This needs to be corrected post haste.

Photostream

Apple’s “solution” to keep your latest photos in the cloud is one of most confusing, antiquated features that’s still shipping on iPhones and iPads running iOS 7.